Plenary speaker Ben Woodard, Ph.D. candidate, University of Western Ontario

Workshop led by Zach Blas, Ph.D. candidate, Duke University

The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference (MIGC) 2014 invites submissions across disciplines and fields that engage with the idea of “ANIMACY” in culture and theory. Derived from linguistics, “animacy” is the condition of being alive or animate, and serves in grammar as a way to classify or rank words on this basis (OED). Yet the rich and overlapping senses of “animacy”, e.g. animate, animation, animus, and animal, reveal the term to more broadly encompass notions of agency, expressivity, sentience, cognizance, and mobility. These notions are often categorized hierarchically, and are saturated with social, cultural, and political implications. Animacy is being increasingly invoked in contemporary discourses of posthumanist and nonhumanist theory, critical ethnic studies, affect theory, object-oriented ontology, queer theory, disability studies, animal studies, eco-criticism, etc. Animacy is a way of troubling the binary of animate vs. inanimate, and instead suggests a more complex system of inter-relatedness between things.

Theorist Mel Y. Chen observes that this “fragile division between animate and inanimate…beyond human and animal — is relentlessly produced and policed,” and this conference seeks to expose the complex political, social, even personal consequences of this division. How do issues of race, ability, sex, class, or age further test the boundaries of the human? What happens when the categorizations of human, animal, and object are no longer cleanly distinct from one another? As Chen’s book asks, how does matter that is considered immobile, insensate, or deathly, animate our cultural lives?

This conference welcomes and encourages research across disciplines to collectively consider, question, and critique “animacy” in theory, art, literature, music, architecture, philosophy, ecology, medicine, anthropology, art history, sociology, media, psychology, mathematics, history, biology and other sciences, etc. This conference will also present an evening of creative performances, readings, and installations. Please see the call for creative work.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Theories of animality and animal studies

Theories of hybridity

Affect studies

Pedagogical issues of animacy, affect, or emotion

Animacy and disability studies

Animacy and age

Illness and animacy

Necropolitics

“Bare life”

“Vibrant matter” and eco-criticism (Bennett)

New Materialisms, including feminist new materialisms

Media studies and vitality

“Naturecultures”

Agential realism

Assemblages

Humanness as a construct

Gaming and animacy

Comic Studies

Cybernetics or “bodies in code”

Neuroscience

Biological animacies

Film and animation studies

Digital animacies

Animacy, ethnic studies, and race

Queer animacies

Animacy and philosophy

Animacy and linguistics

Please email 300-word submissions for individual papers, panels, roundtables, or other formats to: themigc@gmail.com by November 20, 2013. In your submission, please include a title, institutional affiliation, department, and whether you are a MA or PhD student.

The ninth annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference is supported by theCenter for 21st Century Studies, the College of Letters and Sciences, and the department of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.